This Is Not Where It Ends: A Novel

By Richard Alan Carter

Clara Kozlowski is stuck, confused, and afraid that somehow she has wasted her life. After she overcomes her fears that she is undeserving of another chance, Clara declares emotional bankruptcy, leaves the middle-class nonsense behind, and sets out to follow up on the life she surrendered long ago.

Nearly two days later, Clara arrives at her sisters house, grappling with both heartfelt and reckless decisions that lead her to the railroad tracks in the middle of the night. Officer Nelson Little has already had quite a week when he watches a lone woman from afar as she stands in the street at two in the morning watching a train pass. When their paths finally cross a short time later, Clara is contemplating whether it is too late to build a future that may not even exist for her while Officer Little is attempting to come to grips with his unfulfilled dreams. Finally when Clara decides all life is worth the fight, she heads toward the sea with her sister and Officer Little where everything becomes clear under an ever-changing sky.

In this poignant tale, a woman races against time as she catapults herself into an uncertain future and seeks a second chance at the life within her life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Aug 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781480819696

Richard Alan Carter

Richard Alan Carter was born in Falls Church, Virginia. He holds a degree in Technical Writing from Northern Virginia Community College and works in newspaper publishing. This is his debut novel.

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Copyright © 2015 Richard Alan Carter.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Cover photo credit: John Rennison, at The Hamilton Spectator.

ISBN: 978-1-4808-1967-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-1968-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-1969-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015946809

Archway Publishing rev. date: 8/4/2015

For Gisele,

who brought her own light

S he

closed the door behind her, pulled the drapes shut, took off her shoes, stood on a chair, popped out the battery from the smoke detector, sat down on the edge of the bed, and lit a cigarette. The drone from the cars outside on the highway mixed with the fan tumbling around in the room’s air-conditioning unit; a brown-tinged white noise washed over her. She closed her eyes and exhaled. The air in the motel was heavy, cool, and musty. She sat there as if underwater and allowed her mind to clear—her thoughts floating away, dissipating.

She kept her eyes closed as she smoked, the ash wafting across her legs and onto the carpeting. How long has it been? she wondered. How long had it been since the last time she’d stopped running around worrying about every little thing? Stopped worrying what everyone else thought and if they were okay?

How long, huh? Never, maybe?

It sure as hell seemed like maybe never.

Footsteps and muffled speech on the other side of the door brought her back to the present. Her eyes blinked open just in time to see someone pass in front of the window. She got up and walked into the bathroom, dropping the cigarette butt into the toilet before dropping herself onto the seat. Leaning forward with her head nearly between her knees, she peed hard. Out, that’s what she wanted. She wanted it out. But that wasn’t going to happen was it?

Silly girl, she thought. You got just what you wanted. You always got just what you wanted. You got your husband and your kid, your house in the suburbs, and a job that you don’t need. But at least that job gives you a sense of identity, right? Especially here in a town full of people who care more about what they do for a living than what kind of a person they are. You got everything you wanted, and now what?

"Now what, goddamn it? she yelled, standing up in one quick, fluid motion. Turning, she reached out and flushed. Now what?" she mouthed silently as she watched the butt circle the bowl and drop out of sight.

She walked back into the bedroom and sought out the clock; twelve forty-five, everyone’s still at lunch. It’d be another hour before anyone at her job began to wonder where she was. She had time, and she had a decision to make. I could use a drink. But this wasn’t the kind of place with a minibar tucked into the closet. This was the kind of place where the occupants brought their own. Looking around the room, her guess was that there’d been lots of them with lots of it. Climbing onto the bed, she pushed aside the pillow and lay flat on her back.

The Silly Girl Who Always Got What She Wanted

Oh man, how long ago had it been since that fairy tale got wiped?

Little princesses dream big (if not particularly original) dreams. And hey, if you grew up in some redneck shithole, you wouldn’t mock the escape value of a good fairy tale. It’s a fine line that separates a girl from the leering, tattooed masses of inhumanity and the cold, manufactured sheen of vinyl double-paned insularity. You may have played with your Barbie in a trailer, but your Barbie didn’t live in one. How many lithe young millworkers’ daughters jumped on the first bankroll to come their way? Years later, they all ended up the same, though: broken by the sight of themselves wearing a tablecloth and bent over spanking some screaming kid in the aisle of Shopper’s Food Warehouse.

It’s funny now to think about how much she thought she hated that place. In retrospect, it was nothing more than boredom and a sense of adventure that put her in the arms of a boy who would provide a ticket to somewhere else— wherever the hell that was. Growing up, she lived there, and that was that. It was only later, when her father was ill—dying on a bed they’d set up in the front room of the house he’d spent a lifetime sweating blood for and raising a family in—that she came to see it for what it was.

She saw the rotted wood flooring in all corners of the kitchen, the lopsided screen doors, and the sagging drywall ceilings. All those streets with no sidewalks, covered in soot-streaked snow under a gray sky, lined with one stagnant pile of lives after another. She was out front smoking, and she saw a dog across the street chained to a post, in the way only someone without pretense could have done. The poor creature was straining toward a fixed point in the distance. But aren’t we all? she mused wryly. She watched as it circled and pulled, backed up and circled again. The struggle within manifested in a futility of effort transfixed. And for a moment she wanted to release the hero, see him break free and run—all the way back to the land of plenty, to bite the first one of her pretentious neighbors who tottered out onto their sculpted lawn.

Pricks

When her daddy died, a door closed on something she never saw coming. Her past came into focus without the distance of hindsight. For the first time in her life, she was at home. In a place she hadn’t lived for nearly thirty years, her heart finally exhaled.

In the house, in the ambulance, in the hospital.

In the casket, in the church, in the ground.

In the end, it all seemed like a beginning, one from which she was now going to turn her back. It was time to just walk away.

With everyone looking on, she cried. She cried for her dead father, who’d spent his final years alone in the house, his days culminating as he quietly and politely turned down one anonymous phone solicitation after another. She cried because her own time was speeding up. She cried because she was only now making the effort and putting in the emotional capital to follow up on the life she’d long ago surrendered to the easy group-think construction of quintessential middle-class nonsense.

She sat up.

The room grew darker, and the traffic outside sounded fuller. Standing, she smoothed down her blouse with both hands while making eye contact with herself in the mirror across the room. She was cool and dry as she slowly made her way closer to the reflection. Pulling the clothing over and off with one hand, she stopped to peer directly into her own face. That morning in the shower, she’d been enveloped by tears. It was raining tears all around her, and she had been … what? Scared? Confused? Something. Her compass had spun under the fixture. She pressed her hand flat against her belly and slid it up and under her breast. She let her fingers press ever so lightly and rest on the lump. Her nose tingled, she watched the single tear develop, and she knew.

O n the evening of his forty-ninth birthday, the policeman walked out to his cruiser, as he had nearly every evening for twenty-five years. He stood and read the motto embossed on the door panel before getting in:

To Protect and Serve

People say they are not defined by what they do for a living, yet no such thought crossed Officer Nelson Little’s mind. He buckled up, turned the ignition, put the air-conditioning on low, radioed in to the dispatcher, and pulled out onto the road. Another night of service in the town of dwindling means commenced.

He moved steadily through what little traffic there was. More often than not, the others cars yielded the right-of-way once they realized a police presence. Slowly gliding along, he scanned the pedestrians making their way along the sidewalks. He noted passenger-seat occupants eyeing him. He saw someone letting their dog relieve itself next to a mailbox. He watched a man’s hat as it blew off his head in the aftermath of a passing truck and sailed out into traffic, the owner cursing its arc. Someone reached out of a bus stop shelter and gave him the finger.

***

The town itself was a hodgepodge of all things old and older. Today’s crumbling concrete strip malls erected uneasily alongside the long-ago abandoned industrial blocks of yesterday; rooted elderly matrons gave no quarter to the sharp elbows of indifferent usurpers.

Forty-nine years ago, he’d been born in this town, the only child of a local son turned truck driver and a Midwest farm girl graduated to town life, looking for work. Back then, it had been a collection of small, working-class neighborhoods on what a generation before had been farmland. Every once in a while, he’d hear someone talking on the local news about how much better it had been then, or he’d see an old picture in the paper of a long-gone street corner—and he’d almost buy into it.

And then he’d remember the glare to his happy life under the sun.

He thought of a Confederate flag, purposely set out in front of some house, waving in ill-tempered defiance for all with eyes to see.

He thought of those overseas boat kids showing up as a group one day, like children from another planet, being led into his classroom. He thought of how they were set upon by the jeering offspring of those who’d not learned before them.

He thought of the retarded kid down the street who’d gone to the bathroom in his pants. That boy laughed with the crowd surrounding him, his eyes filled with tears. You could all but hear the screaming inside if you tried.

As the years went by, those memories and the associated guilt they were soaked in fueled a desire to do something more than it had taken to get that far: the default position of one who had not stood out. He’d observed some bad things happen, as most kids will eventually, but never took the taint of actual action with him. And while he knew pretty much everyone in his neighborhood, when they all up and moved out piecemeal for the big cities and the money they implied, he realized later that he’d been alone the whole time without even noticing.

His mother was the thinker, the one who’d wanted more for her only child. To have made it this far for her had been a real achievement. To see her son remain static in a place where she had taken a step forward was something that he later suspected she’d resigned herself to. In the last few years, as she receded into illness, confined to a wheelchair, confined to their house, he’d taken to telling her about his work, in part because she loved to hear what was going on outside of her four walls, and to impart some sense of what his work meant to him, that he wasn’t just biding time in his life. Officer Nelson Little came to realize that it didn’t take much of an investigation to find out that this girl in glasses from the cold northern acres had learned to make do with less than she deserved, silently watching her dreams slip away.

So his job took on a role in his mind that he dared not mention—a cleansing redemption, a chance to steady the tilting lives that surrounded him in unstable situations. He was a solid presence in a familiar environment looking for an opportunity to intervene. Alone among a division of armed men empowered to exert the enforcement of law, he saw past action and on into motivation. He had seen the idealism of the newly indoctrinated crush lightly under the weight of the seasoned cynic. He became, he needed to be, a stalwart against the swinging truncheons of the disillusioned majority.

In other words Officer Nelson Little was inherently incapable of escaping his unerring sense of right and wrong—much to the dismay of several coworkers. They who were nothing more than small-town bullies given a chance to act out with the full force of the law behind them. As such, Officer Little was as likely to follow up station calls that required climbing trees for errant pets and retirement home residential arguments as he was to assist in the resolution of any actual criminal activity. He never saw this as anything other than his duty as a policeman. As a result, he was mocked ruthlessly. He took this as good-natured ribbing between men with tough jobs; they hated his guts for not being able to openly flaunt their graft.

***

9-1 this is Dispatch, his radio buzzed. Little, you out there?

He’d gotten the call. There was a disturbance at the new Chuck E Cheese restaurant on the edge of town; go and see what it was all about. He tightened his seat belt, flipped on the strobe light, and let the sirens scream. This, he told himself, is what it’s all about.

Arriving on the scene, Officer Nelson Little stepped out into what would be one of the defining moments of his life. My god …, he mouthed, exiting his cruiser into what looked to him to be something akin to an apocalypse.

The parking lot was full of screaming children running amuck in every direction, parents screaming and running after them. The noise was deafening. The ground was littered